Linguistic career

Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language andphilology. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated withOld Norseas special subject. He worked for theOxford English Dictionaryfrom 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, includingwalrus, over which he struggled mightily.[167]In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at theUniversity of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students oflinguisticsfrom five to twenty. He gave courses in Old Englishheroic verse,history of English, variousOld EnglishandMiddle Englishtexts, Old and Middle English philology, introductoryGermanicphilology,Gothic,Old Icelandic, andMedieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon atPembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".[168]He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish.[169]

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things ofracialand linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lectureEnglish and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak.[170]He considered theWest Midlandsdialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and, as he wrote toW. H. Audenin 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."[171]

Tolkien learnedLatin, French, and German from his mother, and while at school he learned Middle English, Old English, Finnish,Gothic, Greek, Italian,Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh, andMedieval Welsh. He was also familiar with Danish, Dutch,Lombardic, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian,[172]Swedish and older forms of modern Germanic and Slavonic languages,[173]revealing his deep linguistic knowledge, above all of theGermanic languages.

Language construction

See also:Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien

Ah! likeGOLDfall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!The beginning of the Quenya poemNamriwritten inTengwarand inLatinscript

Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection forconstructing languages. The most developed of these areQuenyaandSindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien'slegendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter ofaestheticsandeuphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek.[141]A notable addition came in late 1945 withAdnaicorNmenrean, a language of a "faintlySemiticflavour", connected with Tolkien'sAtlantislegend, which byThe Notion Club Papersties directly into his ideas about the inability of language to be inherited, and via the "Second Age" and the story ofErendilwas grounded in thelegendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's 20th-century "real primary world" with the legendary past of his Middle-earth.

Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view ofauxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lectureA Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he had concluded that "Volapk,Esperanto,Ido,Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".[174]

The popularity of Tolkien'sBOOKShas had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellingsdwarvesanddwarvish(alongsidedwarfsanddwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-19th century and earlier. (In fact, according to Tolkien, had theOld Englishplural survived, it would have beendwarrowsordwerrows.) He also coined the termeucatastrophe, though it remains mainly used in connection with his own work.

Legacy

After Tolkien

Reception of

Adaptations of

Works inspired by

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Adaptations

Main article:Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien

In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien wrote about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which "[t]he cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama".[175]The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him werePauline Baynes(Tolkien's favourite illustrator ofThe Adventures of Tom BombadilandFarmer Giles of Ham) andDonald Swann(who set the music toThe Road Goes Ever On). QueenMargrethe II of Denmarkcreated illustrations toThe Lord of the Ringsin the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings.[176]

However, Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving. In 1946, he rejected suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition ofThe Hobbitas "tooDisnified... Bilbo with a dribbling nose, andGandalfas a figure of vulgar fun rather than theOdinicwanderer that I think of".[177]

Tolkien was sceptical of the emergingTolkien fandomin the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition ofThe Lord of the Rings:

Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.[141]